3 ms·

I read a about a study which considered how scientists and engineers who wrote code thought about their programs. The scientists considered their code as an ext

I read a about a study which considered how scientists and engineers who wrote code thought about their programs. The scientists considered their code as an extension of their own thinking, whereas engineers were mainly preoccupied with how the code could fail. There is probably also a virtuous cycle which reinforces how the scientist and engineer view their code, so it may be hard to untangle how much of that thought pattern was "innate" vs learned. I think your question is interesting and I wonder if it may depend (in part) on one's motivations for writing software.

civilized 5y ago
> I read a about a study which considered how scientists and engineers who wrote code thought about their programs. The scientists considered their code as an extension of their own thinking, whereas engineers were mainly preoccupied with how the code could fail. This makes sense when you consider why they're writing the code. Scientists use code as an electronic brain to answer scientific questions that are too complicated to answer mentally or with pen and paper. Engineers create services that don't necessarily answer scientific questions, but do useful work and need to be reliable. There is a substantial intersection though: for example, Google provides services that answer interesting/scientific questions, like "what are people saying on the internet" and "the frequency of words in books over time", while also being thoroughly engineered for performance and reliability.